


Desafinado

by stitchy



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Dancing, M/M, Story: The Adventure of the Three Garridebs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-30
Updated: 2014-09-30
Packaged: 2018-02-19 08:23:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2381552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stitchy/pseuds/stitchy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John starts to laugh, and struggles to his elbows to see if he’s merely lightheaded from blood loss, or the sudden and much more alarming revelation of Sherlock’s heart. With a gulp he realizes how soon it will be now. He takes a few more deep and even breaths, because there’s no need to rush after so long. Soon is good enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Desafinado

**Author's Note:**

> "Desafinado", a Portuguese word (usually rendered into English as "Out of Tune", or as "Off Key"), is the title of a bossa nova song composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim.

As soon as he moves back to Baker Street, he knows there will be something, and though he watches around every corner, when it all starts it’s sudden and bright and takes him off his feet. 

The gunshot shocks him, more than it hurts- he’d been feeling so invincible running with Sherlock again. He’s been waiting for something to happen, and its supposed to happen sometime soon, and he’ll never forgive himself if he doesn’t live to see it. His lungs clench and a creeping certainty is telling him it’s his fault for wishing never to watch Sherlock die again, he’s going to to clock out first  _right now_  while Sherlock watches instead. How embarrassing.

Some dim part of his brain knows that he’s hearing echos ringing in the alleyway but the front of his mind insists they are still under fire. His response to reality shuts down while he flickers through Afghanistan. His heart is pounding. Near Misses. Hits. His friends and his own shoulder torn apart and his eyes filled with blood and Sherlock’s shirt blooming red. He’s panicking and he knows that’s all; it’s a panic attack. The pain is nothing. No where near as consuming as before. Then Sherlock is looming over him, begging for response. His eyes are glittering and his hands are shaking where they clamp his leg above the injury.

“John!”

He watches distantly while Sherlock falls to pieces.

“John! You have to.. You have to be all right. I can’t. I can’t… _anything_  without you.”

He needs to stop breathing so shallow. He knows this. He sucks in deeply. He’s going to be fine, He’s upset Sherlock.  _Get up and stop it_ , he tells himself.  _Come on John._

“You have to tell me what to do. Please John, please please please John. Talk to me.”

John always does his best to follow a command given in the field, and he always, always does as Sherlock asks, even if he doesn’t understand why. He exhales. It’s difficult, but he focuses on the repeat of Sherlock’s pleas. He tries to match his heart beat to the rhythm. He steadies himself in the voice, and comes back to scene- the case. The shooter?

“Have to get your man, Sherlock.”

“Not important,” Sherlock dismisses, with tears still streaming down his face. “Tell me.”

“Sherlock?” John wonders at the urgency in his voice, and strains his neck to see him better.

“John I swear… anything… anything you’ll ever ask. I’ll never take another case! Tell me how to fix this.”

“What kind of a rubbish promise is that?” John starts to laugh, and struggles to his elbows to see if he’s merely lightheaded from blood loss, or the sudden and much more alarming revelation of Sherlock’s heart. With a gulp he realizes how soon it will be now. He takes a few more deep and even breaths, because there’s no need to rush after so long. Soon is good enough.

“John!”

“Oh, it’s.. it’s hardly a scratch, Sherlock.” He makes his tone as gentle as possible. “Just help me up.”

“You think you should walk?!” Sherlock’s fingers slip away from his leg and take him by the arm to help him sit up. His face is blanched, nearly expressionless but for a steady blink and it’s all John can do to keep from laughing again. Sherlock watches him closely, no doubt measuring the return of John’s control over his own breath.  
  
“Sherlock,” He says, looking him properly in the face, “If you want I’ll _dance_.”  
  
Sherlock takes him by the hands and slowly rises, pulling John up along with him. They’re both a bit unsteady, and Sherlock doesn’t release his grip for a long beat.  
“I’m holding you to that, John.”  
  
“Please do,” he says, arranging his mouth in what he hopes is an effortless grin.   
  
Sherlock huffs while he hops from foot to foot to shake it off before they pick up the chase again.

  
*

After the arrest Sherlock offers to buy dinner, which sounds excellent, really excellent, but John asks that they stop off at home so he can put on fresh jeans and slap on a bandage. Sherlock waits in the taxi while he goes up to the flat. He would take the stairs two at a time if it wasn’t such overkill. As it is, he stamps his way up the flight and is a step from the landing when he hears Mrs. Hudson’s door open, and he winces. Too Loud?  
  
“John? That you? I’d like to borrow you when you have a moment,” she says from below.  
  
“I’m only in for a sec, but yeah.”  
  
Once he’s up to his room he decides on trading his jacket for one that is slightly dressier as well as pulling on some new trousers. He fusses his hair a moment in the mirror when he notices his heart hammering for the second time that day, but this time it’s pleasant.  
  
When he pokes his head into Mrs. Hudson’s flat he’s hit by wave of fragrance. She startles when he coughs behind her.  
  
“Oh! Bit of a headcold, can’t smell or hear on the left,” she says, shaking her head a bit, like she’s just gone swimming. John supposes that explains her over doing it with the perfume.  
  
“You wanted something?”  
  
“Yes, I just wanted to have you sign the new papers, as Sherlock renegotiated the terms for New Years. It’s almost exactly the same, only-” But John finds the clause at the bottom:

  
-Tenant(s) shall pay to Landlord monthly installments of £2,000 per month payable in advance on the first day of each month for a total lease payment of £240,000 at which point Tenant(s) becomes Purchaser(s)-

  
“Purchasers?! And this can’t be right, a townhome’s got to be _twice_ that at least- Mrs. Hudson!” he objects, thrusting the paper back at her.  
  
“I’m not going to be around forever, and I don’t have any children so I’m renting-to-own, in ten years. If you boys fancy buying me out before then, as much as I adore you two, I’m delighted to go some place with fewer…incidents.” The firm line of her mouth brooks no argument. “In fact, Sherlock has offered me a cottage he’d like me to keep an eye on for you.”  
  
John stands there, dazed. He’s always known Mrs. Hudson was getting on, and assumed if Sherlock still cared to live with him at that point they’d need to throw themselves at the mercy of whatever new landlord bought the property. She certainly wasn’t charging them typical rates, and had been absurdly tolerant of Sherlock’s carrying on. John had lost many an hour worrying over the matter- but now to find out that Sherlock had determined not only to dig in roots with him, but has plans for their retirement, ten, twenty years down the road?   
  
“I don’t know what to say.”  
  
“Don’t say, just sign, and don’t keep Himself waiting!” she urges him, laying out the paper and pen on her counter top.  
  
When John slides back into the taxi, Sherlock sniffs. “Oh, good. You spoke with Mrs. Hudson.”  
  
John clears his throat. “Well at least now I won’t have to do the song and dance of my life to get the deposit back.”  
  
“That’s the spirit.”  
  
John revises his earlier, hazy thought. It might not just be soon, it might be tonight.

  
*

  
“Put something on, will you?”

Sherlock’s eyebrows shoot up, he doesn’t even have to look down to know he’s fully dressed, even _over_ dressed for this time of evening.  
  
“Something with a beat,” John clarifies, and he finally catches on.  
  
After disappearing into his room for a moment he comes back with one of those immense collector’s disc sets and fiddles with his laptop while muttering something about how he hasn’t had a chance to import the files yet. Whatever it is he’s put on is “loungey” and Portuguese, but not from Portugal, John recognizes. He watches Sherlock shuck his jacket and roll his burgundy shirt sleeves. With his loose 9 o’clock curls, it’s a perfect picture of a Latin dance instructor.  
  
“Err. Brazilian?”  
  
“Mmm. Bossa Nova.”  
  
“Ah, like Girl from Ipanema?”  
  
Sherlock sighs. He demonstrates the basic foot work before offering his straightened arms in a familiar closed-frame. John joins him, hand on shoulder and ready to follow. Sherlock is very specific about the movements, and as they continue it’s obvious this is less out of a strictness, and more from a love of information and technique.  
  
“Didn’t you ever listen to any music produced after your birth?”  
  
“In Uni. Don’t forget to collect your feet.”  
  
Sherlock explains the contributions of Joao Gilberto to classical guitar, his fingers fluttering at the bottom of John’s shoulder blade while he gets a bit poetic about the topic. He’s never seen hint of another instrument at Baker Street, but he did catch Sherlock on an unmanned piano during a lull at the Fairbank house, once. To John’s mind, it’s possible he has a working knowledge of the entire orchestra. When John takes the lead on the next song, Sherlock explains that while jazz moves back to front, samba rhythm moves side to side. He allows the bounce, and is pleased to see Sherlock shimmy and smirk back at him. He feels much more confident with this dance than waltzing lessons, aggressive even.   
  
“You’re getting… jazzy again, John.”  
  
“We _are_ going back and forth.”  
  
“That’s because it’s a spot dance, but you can’t be so one-sided, remember what I told you; dance is a conversation.”  
  
“Right.”  
  
“You’re doing it again. Stop talking about your feet. Tell me about your day.”  
  
John narrows his eyes. They’ve spent nearly every moment of the last fifteen hours together. “Well first this mad man woke me up at the arsecrack of dawn.”  
  
“Did he? I imagine he had his reasons.”  
  
“It’s all right, he made it up to me by letting me shoot a gun.” Sherlock smiles. “And he seemed rather moved when he thought someone had shot me back.”  
  
“They had,” Sherlock points out, and now he’s the stiff one, barely exhibiting a sway while refusing to make eye contact.  
  
John decides; it’s going to happen right now. “You said...you can’t be without me.”   
  
Sherlock snaps back to look at him. “You said you’d dance.”  
  
“I did. I am,” John says when he bends and drops his elbow, closing their position from arms length to a hands breadth.  
  
“What changed?” Sherlock asks, lowly.  
  
“I didn’t think you wanted to? And that was mostly fine. I tried to keep in mind that I had other options, but. It was a bit like trying to reinvent the wheel, after meeting you.”   
  
John stops moving in an effort to keep back any rambling metaphors about bicycles. Once they’re both stopped they still have one set of hands suspended in the air. Sherlock lets go enough to slide his hand around John’s wrist and gather it to his chest. The tune changes, and John isn’t quite sure what to do, so he leads them back into step.  
  
“They’re playing your song,” Sherlock tells him, like he ought to know.  
  
“I have a song? Says who?”  
  
“Makes me think of you. Well. A lot of songs do. Made my month in Calais unbearable.”  
  
John knows for certain Sherlock hasn’t been to France since he was en route home from being dead. He shakes his head. “How long since you've been hearing songs that made you think of me?”  
  
“2011,” Sherlock replies, as easily as if he’s been asked to verify his telephone number. “Though sometimes they didn’t yet exist so I had to write them myself.”  
  
He’d ask to hear them if he wasn’t so certain he already had. All those melodies he thought were for someone else are just another dressing of the years of misunderstanding. He spent ages refusing to tune himself to the music, worried that he’d be the only one dancing.  
   
“I’m sorry it’s taken so long, Sherlock.”  
  
“With a different tempo it’d be a different dance,” he shrugs, as much as their entangled posture will allow. “And I quite like this one.”  
  
John lets his head fall on Sherlock’s shoulder next to their joined hands, and despite the rhythm of the song they slow to a sway.  
  
“Now we’re here we can take our time.”


End file.
